With a Member State’s accession to the EU, national judges acquire new powers as well responsibilities. National ‘juges communautaire de droit commun’ are expected uphold principle of EU law supremacy; interpret in conformity with law; set aside provisions incompatible rules; when required, apply ex officio; and send preliminary question CJEU CJEU’s answers needed for resolution domestic legal ...

Background: In order to protect the environment, humans are required to comply with environmental ethics, as set forth in environmental laws. Unfortunately, oil pollution has had many negative impacts on the Earth's environment in recent years, so various countries have been examining and deciding on new environmental laws over many years. Many decisions overlap with international law and have ...

The issue of the influence of norms on behavior is as old as sociology itself. This paper explores the effect of normative homophily (i.e. “sharing the same normative choices”) on the evolution of the advice network among lay judges in a courthouse. Blau’s (1955, 1964) social exchange theory suggests that members select advisors based on the status of the advisor. Additional research shows that...

Recently, Scholer and Turpin [Proc. SIGIR 2008] proposed the use of techniques from the field of psychophysics to determine a relevance threshold for a user. Using this threshold, they observed, one could match the relevance criteria of users to those of judges used to develop a test collection, hence selected users should have a better search experience with systems judged superior on that col...

In many countries, an athlete’s performance at sporting competitions is often used as part of the selection criteria for entry into college. These criteria could be biased depending upon the procedures utilized by the authorities in a particular country. The purpose of this study was to calibrate, by using the Rasch rating scale model, the judge-based weights associated with the different quali...

Federal appellate judges cite cases by sister circuits. Why is that? Common wisdom holds that judges look to out-of-circuit cases for credible legal arguments -as persuasive precedent. But hard-core adherents of the attitudinal model (Segal and Spaeth 2002) – and certain cynical realists and critical legal studies scholars – might argue that judges decide in accordance with their policy or poli...